Orimupiko 22 and the Haze of History1
Orimupiko 22 and the Haze of History1 RACHEL BUCHANAN Certain types of chaotic events lure historians and readers. While giving birth is a chaotic, exceptional, creative event it is also a private, universal and prosaic one. While not all women will give birth, all men and women have been born. Wars and natural disasters, however, present a different order of chaos. They are destructive, exceptional and public. Wars and disasters rupture time. What once existed is no more. People die. Mountains collapse. Homes burn. Ships shatter. Villages empty. Residents flee. Roads split. Swamps rise. Forests fall. Some of these events are over in a flash. A dormant fault-line shudders, the earth shakes, buildings crack and crumble and collapse, people are crushed. Others, like wars, go on and on, spreading and intensifying the chaos, knifing time and splitting it apart. One of the jobs of the historian is to create a narrative that makes sense of disturbing events, either distant or more recent, and so bring order to chaos. Many relish this challenge. ‘Battles are notoriously difficult phenomena to reconstruct,’ warned James Belich in the introduction to the revisionist history of the New Zealand Wars that made his career.2 Belich responded by constructing a thematic ‘overview’ of events, one that necessarily erased the mess and confusion of so many bloody moments by concentrating on the motivations of leading individuals and broad categories of people: ‘Europeans’ and ‘Māori’. Another path focuses upon on chronology and so construct a before, during
[Show full text]